Cassandra is a figure from ancient mythology. Able to see into the future, she warned her fellow Trojans of impending doom, but nobody believed her. Modern literary adaptions often stress the curse she was under - knowing that her often gloomy predictions, though ridiculed and disbelieved by her contemporaries, would eventually come true.

Central Bank

A central bank typically is in charge of the monetary policy of a country - or in the case of the European Union, for the entire Euro zone. Its responsibility is to ensure monetary stability for the region covered by means of a number of instruments, including interest rates, money supply and lending facilities to banks.
Most central banks in developed economies are government-independent.

A CDO is a security that typically consists of a pool of debt of any possible kind (such as mortgages, corporate debt, student loans, etc). Synthetic CDOs on top of that also include derivatives, for example Credit Default Swaps.
CDOs often are structured in multiple tranches with different priority, e.g. in case of defaults they get affected differently.

Commercial Paper

Short-term unsecured debt notes issued by large corporations or banks, focused on covering liquidity gaps for example to cover payrolls at months' end. They typically run from a few days to a couple of months. Currently, most commercial paper in the United States is guaranteed by the FDIC, as a response to the Lehman Brothers failure.

Credit Default Swaps can be compared to insurance against the loss on debt. The concept works as follows: An investor owning debt of a specific kind pays an annual fee to the 'insurance'. In case of the original debtor defaulting, the investor is entitled to receive his investment against the defaulted debt. The price of credit insurance is typically dependent on the rating of the original debtor. In addition to those transactions described above, CDS protection can also be purchased for speculative reasons, e.g. without owning the underlying debt.